This rare, undated lithograph of Norfolk's historic 1739 Borough Church and its graveyard was made shortly after the edifice was renovated, equipped with a wooden cupola, and renamed St. Paul's Episcopal Church in 1832. The print, issued by John Childs of New York City, was made from a drawing by J. L. Meyer.
Graveyard is a Who's Who of early Norfolk
By George Tucker
The Virginian Pilot, Oct 1, 2000
The time-honored grave-yard surrounding St.Paul's Episcopal Church, formerly
the Borough Church, in downtown Norfolk, is our local outdoor counterpart of
Westminster Abbey in London. Not that the tree-embowered, bird-haunted area,
like its more celebrated English mortuary equivalent, is a final resting
place for world famous celebrities. But within its ancient brick-walled
enclosure the high and mighty as well as the more lowly citizens of Norfolk
were buried for well over 150 years.
Although the churchyard was provided for when John Ferebee, the Lower Norfolk
County Surveyor, laid out the original site of Norfolk in 1680-81, there are
no surviving gravestones there commemorating local residents from that early
period. The three 17th-century stones now there were transported to the site
later from other places in Tidewater Virginia.
Despite this unfortunate loss, however, there are still 22 Pre-Revolutionary
gravestones left in the churchyard in various states of repair, the oldest
one being that of Mary Dyson, the wife of William Dyson, who died at the
tender age of 18 on Jan. 3, 1748. The other Pre-Revolutionary stones, many
of them of English origin as well as beautiful examples of the stonecutter's
art, memorialize the Archer, Taylor, Portlock, Hutchings, Rothery, Marsden,
Tucker and Calvert families, all of whom have living descendants in
present-day Norfolk or elsewhere.
Moreover, seven former Norfolk mayors are buried there. These are John
Tucker, Dr. John K. Read, Dr. James
Taylor, Robert Taylor, John Hutchings, George Abyvon and John Taylor. The
elaborately carved armorial
marker of the last was moved to its present place when Taylor's body was also
transferred to the churchyard
many years ago from his burial ground on the site of the, newly restored
185@-59 U.S. Customs House at Main
and Granby streets.
Of Particular interest are three identical altar tombs marking the burial
sites of Mrs. Helen Calvert Read
(175O-1833), a daughter of Maximilian Calvert, one of Norfolk's most colorful
pre-Revolutionary mayors, and
her two husbands, James Maxwell (d. 1795), a Scotsman turned Patriot who was
a commissioner of the Virginia
state navy during the Revolution, and Dr. John K. Read, a sometime-alderman
and mayor of Norfolk.
By her first husband, Mrs. Read was the mother of William Maxwell, an ardent
member and longtime vice President of the Virginia Historical Society. It
was he who recorded his mother's sparkling memoirs that were first published
in pamphlet in 1970 by the Norfolk Historical Society of Chesapeake - a book
well worth reading for its amusing and down-to-earth anecdotes.
Two other notable burials in St. Paul's churchyard should be noted. The
first is Revolutionary Gen. Thomas Mathews, for whom Mathews County was
named, and the second is Col. John Nivison (1760-1820), a prominent lawyer
and judge that Hugh Blair Grigsby, the Norfolk historian, remembered this way:
"I can see this old man, too, with the freshness of the passing hour, as he
was driving out in his capacious chariot to Lawson's or as he strolled or
rather rocked (Nivison weighed nearly 300 pounds) along the sidewalk.
Whether he was fond of the classics, I cannot affirm, but he borrowed a trait
of Homer, and nodded occasionally, and when a tedious speaker began his
harangue, having already taken a full view of the law and the facts in the
case, he usually fell asleep, waking up as the counsel finished his harangue,
much refreshed at least, if not instructed by it, and proceeded to give
judgment in the case."
After having served Norfolk for almost a century and a half, the old
churchyard had become so crowded that an ordinance was passed denying burial
there to anyone whose near relations had not been previously interred there.
Finally, after the opening of Cedar Grove Cemetery, the city fathers put a
stop to burials of all kinds there in 1835. Since then, interment in the
historic spot has required permission from the church vestry as well as a
city ordinance. And so far, fewer than a dozen people have been so honored.
Almost all of the tombstone inscriptions in St. Paul's churchyard are novels
in brief, but one of them is more
notable than the others. It is the epitaph on the altar tomb of Mrs. David
Duncan and her two children who died in a fire in 1823. The poetical tag
after the biographical details reads: "Insatiate archer, could not one
suffice? "Thy shaft . flew thrice, and thrice my peace was slain."
Pathetic though this is considering how Duncan's wife and children died,
history records the cynical fact that he
was not long without consolation. For the marriage records of the Norfolk
Corporation Court show that not quite a year after the tragic death of his
first wife and children, Duncan was again on his way to the altar.
